Overview

Mevas is a canvas system from designed for MeBox. It's based on Imlib2 has render engine.

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Canvas Objects

Mevas basic types

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Freevo widgets based on mevas

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Render Engine

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Display Engine

Mevas uses a special display canvas to show the content. There are several display engines in the 'mevas/displays' subdirectory:

bitmapcanvas: This is no real output canvas, it is only a base for others. It renders the whole display into one image that can be displayed. Most display engines use this way because they always have one big image in memory.
pygamecanvas: Based on bitmapcanvas this engine uses pygame to show the screen. It works on all output modules of SDL, like framebuffer and X11.
imlib2canvas: This display engine opens an Imlib2 window and uses the bitmapcanvas to draw the window content.
bmovlcanvas: Use the bmovl fifo to a running mplayer to show the screen. Also based on bitmapcanvas.
mplayercanvas: Use bmovl2 without the bitmapcanvas to show the content on a running mplayer (needs bmovl2 patch for mplayer).
ivtvcanvas: Use the ivtv framebuffer to output on ivtv tv cards (PleaseUpdate: add more doc)

To use the display engines in Freevo, there must be a file with inheriting from a display canvas in src/gui/displays. The output canvas will be chosen by the GUI_DISPLAY variable in Freevo (e.g. GUI_DISPLAY='imlib2' will use src/gui/display/imlib2.py).

Right now someone is working on a DirectFB canvas. But it would be nice to have more display engines for the best possible tv out. They all will need a python lib between C code and mevas. For a list of possible future display canvas see HelpNeeded. If you want to help, please send a mail to the Freevo devel mailing list or contact me directly.

Note: mplayercanvas is not present in the sourcecode anymore (and hasn't been for a long time). This is (prbably) mainly because bmovl2 has been abandoned in favour of vf_overlay. The prefered way to use vf_overlay in combination with kaa is using the kaa.player. The vf_overlay patch needed to do this can be found at http://urandom.ca/mebox/downloads.php